All about embedded systems engineering.

Main menu

Post navigation

The best news I’ve heard in a LONG time!

One of the most pernicious and damaging mistakes, injurious to world progress, has to have been the decision to allow the patenting of software. These patents have served to obstruct progress, destroy innovation, and fatten the wallets of lawyers and greedy patent trolls.

Now, to some, software patents are an awesome idea. If your goal is to provide more work for legal departments at large companies or you need to attack a competitor with the gaul of being better than you, then software patents are for you! They’re also great at destroying small, upstart companies with all of their “new ideas” stuff. Heck, even if the patent does NOT apply, prolonged legal proceedings can serve just as well.

Seriously, software patents are of dubious virtue at the best of times. Now finally, after many years of suffering under the lawyer’s savage yoke, there may be some hope:

This a great article with a video for the tl;dr; crowd. Still, I’d like to focus on a little excerpt from the article that is, I think, the heart of the matter:

Pointing out that intellectual property monopolies can limit free speech, Mayer notes that copyright law has built-in First Amendment protections such as “fair use” and that patent law must include similar safeguards. He suggests that the safeguard comes in the form of a part of the Patent Act, known as “Section 101,” which says some things—including abstract ideas—simply can’t be patented in the first place.

I really hope that this is the beginning of the end for software patents! I really do! I look forward to the day when they and the profits of the trolls are all dead and buried. Just don’t expect me to bring flowers to the grave site.